Customer Applicability of TS 16949

So here is the hypothetical. Say you're a company who does a portion of your work in the automotive sector. You are a sub tier supplier. You have one main customer who strongly suggests you to be TS 16949 registered. So you obviously do it for them. But you have a couple of others whose products may have automotive applications (they may be service or aftermarket or a combination) but don't request or require TS registration. Lets say they have never really address certification and you have never done a full AIAG PPAP on their parts. Looking at their sales volume you can determine TS is overkill - i.e.; not worth the trouble. Do you need to included them in your TS system?

It seems to me that you're mixing up some terminology and are missing some vital understanding. There's no such thing as a "TS System". You operate a quality management system which complies with and is audited/registered to ISO/TS 16949 requirements. Did you ask WHY they didn't ask for you to be certified? Maybe they know you are, so didn't bother - it's "understood"? They may not have asked for PPAP - is that because they are unaware of the benefits? Did you ever explain the benefits?

If you have customers who don't put any product demands on you that you would employ the tools mentioned, it's YOUR risk, to not process that product (although quite why you'd do that, I cannot fathom, since the rest of industry is realizing they are pretty good tools). Furthermore, since you can also have an ISO 9001 compliant quality management system as the foundation of your system which complies with TS, you can elect (as do other organizations) to put customers' work through that process (indeed, aftermarket should be handled this way according to the TS rules - from memory, FWIW).

I agree with Andy on the first part, TS16949 is a QMS system, you are either in it or out of it. Otherwise you would be managing multiple systems for multiple products, which is a confusing mess. What I do currently is just this situation, since 75% of our parts are architectural, maybe 20% rail, and the remaining 5% split between aerospace and automotive, is that I supply the product to my automotive customers using the tools they expect from TS16949. A full part submission warrant with all the MSA forms and all. For aerospace I submit the AS9100 FAI with all required documentation. We are certified to neither of these specifications but our customers see that we have the knowledge to supply them to the standards they expect. We cannot justify certification to these standards for the volumes we produce, but providing the tools they expect anyway shows we are not clueless about what is needed.